This feels complicated to say, because it’s going to make me seem like I don’t care about abuse and harassment described in the article. I do. It’s really bad and I wish it hadn’t happened, and I’m particularly sad that it’s happened within my community, and (more) that people in my community seemed often to not support the victims.
But I honestly feel very upset about the anti-polyamory vibe of all this. Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser. It’s not accepted in the wider community, so I value its acceptance in EA. I’d be sad if there was a community backlash against it because of stuff like this, because that would hurt a lot of people and I don’t think it would solve the problem.
I think the anti-poly vibe also makes it kind of...harder to work out what’s happening, and what exactly is bad, or something? Like, the article describes lots of stuff that’s unambiguously bad, like grooming and assault. But it says stuff like ‘Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college’. Like, what does it mean to ‘recruit someone to join your polyamorous relationship’? You mean he asked her out, when he was much older and she was in college, and he happened to be poly? Yet it’s sandwiched between descriptions of two unambiguously awful incidents of sexual harassment and grooming.
There was also a quote from someone who complained about her poly partner being a fuckboy. Which like… maybe this guy was not a good partner, but that’s kind of unrelated to whether he had multiple partners. And ‘this guy I dated was kind of a fuckboy and I wasn’t happy in the relationship’ isn’t in the same ballpark as abuse and harassment!
The inclusion of less-bad things doesn’t negate the broad point of the article, but if we want to actually tackle sexual harassment, it helps to know what exactly the problem is, rather than gesturing at ‘these people have Unconventional Ways and that’s Suspicious’.
I agree that the article moves between several situations of issues of hugely varying severity without acknowledging that, and this isn’t very helpful. And I like that EA is able to be a welcoming place for people who enjoy relationship structures that are discriminated against in the wider world. But I did want to push back against one particular piece:
Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser.
In figuring out how we should view polyamory a key question to me is what it’s effects are. Imagine we could somehow run an experiment where we went back to having a taboo on non-monogamy regardless of partner consent: how would we expect the world to be different? Some predictions I’d make:
People who enjoy polyamorous relationships would be worse off.
Some people would be more productive because they’re less distracted by partner competition.
Other people would be less productive because getting a lot done was part of their approach to partner competition.
Some people would have kids who otherwise wouldn’t, or have kids earlier in life.
...
There would be less of the kind of power abuse described in the article because most high-status men would be married and this would be riskier for them (argued above).
Imagine a similar article talking about how it’s common for people on college campuses to drink and then assault people. While I would agree that drinking alcohol is morally neutral on its own, if it predictably leads to people assaulting each other more than they would in its absence that is one consideration among many for whether to discourage it.
[EDIT: see my response to Kelsey, below—I’m not advocating EAs avoid polyamory]
[this is partly also responding to your response to Kelsey below]
I think I view this differently because I prize personal freedom (for everyone) really highly, and I also think that the damage of community disapproval/the norms being ‘against’ you is pretty high, so I would be hesitant to argue strongly against any consensual and in-principle-not-harmful relationship style, even if there was evidence that it led to worse outcomes. In that situation, I’d try to mitigate the bad outcomes rather than discouraging the style.
To get a sense of why poly people are upset about this, imagine if someone was like ‘there are better outcomes if people are celibate—you save so much time and emotional energy that can be spent on research! So you should break up with your partner’. You’d probably have a strong ‘uh, no, wtf, I’m not doing that’ reaction. And maybe you’d say ‘oh I would never say anyone would break up with their partners’, but depriving someone of future potential positive relationships is also bad, and… like… maybe I’m just neurotic or not assertive enough or something, but if someone says ‘X is bad’, and I do X, I am inclined to take that seriously.
I also think advocating against polyamory wouldn’t be very effective at curbing abuses that stem from abusers being exposed to less risk, because I think if you’re brazen and sociopathic enough to do some of the things described in the article, and also high status, you’re not really going to care about whether your relationship style is vaguely discouraged. Like, stuff like grooming and hitting on young people you have power over and assault is already more-than-vaguely discouraged, and that didn’t help!
To get a sense of why poly people are upset about this, imagine if...
I’m confused by your analogy to celibacy because the analogous statements seem really different from anything I’ve said or think? I don’t think there are better outcomes if people refrain from polyamory, haven’t told anyone they should break up, and don’t think polyamory is bad.
if you’re brazen and sociopathic enough to do some of the things described in the article, and also high status, you’re not …
This is getting deeper into a hypothetical (“what I think I would do in an alternative world where I had strong evidence that polyamory was harmful”) that I don’t think is very helpful? If you really want to know what I would do in this situation I’m willing to continue, but I’m nervous about people misinterpreting and thinking that I’m talking about a non-hypothetical.
I’m sorry to have misinterpreted you. I guess I’m confused by what your broad point is now—where do we disagree? I think I don’t understand why you disagree with my comment that ‘Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser.’
Please mentally reimagine this comment for some other ‘chosen’-stigma subgroup—being gay, trans or whatever.
You’re not wrong that in some abstract sense there’s a fact of the matter about having more people be that way makes the world better or worse, but that doesn’t mean it’s +EV to do armchair speculation about. And raising such speculation in response to someone saying they feel targeted by prejudice seems like particularly unempathic timing.
I am only tangentially involved in EA, but have been actively polyamorous for around ten years, so I hope it’s not too callous for me specifically to say that that was the most striking part of the article. The article includes a lot of sensationalizing and othering language around polyamory, including the repeated use of “join a polyamorous relationship” to mean dating someone who’s polyamorous, and the ‘so-called “polycules.”’ line.
I agree that it’s bad behavior for polyamorous people to pressure mono people to be poly, talk about monogamy as “less enlightened”, and such (and agree with quinn that it would reduce avenues for attacks on our community to actively discourage this behavior); but I think it’s kind of dishonest to discuss this without mentioning that mono people can be overly quick to categorize positive discussion of polyamory as “pressuring people to be mono”, due to the marginalized position of polyamory in society and the biases that creates.
The article itself is an example:
Prominent figures in EA have cast polyamory as a more “rational” romantic arrangement. The philosopher Peter Singer, whose writing is a touchstone for EA leaders, seemed to endorse polyamory in a July 2017 interview in which he argued that monogamy may be increasingly anachronistic in the age of birth control.
If you click through to the interview, though, what he argues is that 1) monogamy is partially rooted in men’s desire to know if children they’re fathering are biologically theirs and women’s desire to know if they can rely on their partner to stick around to help provide for a child 2) these worries might be lessened in the age of birth control, though he “would be surprised if [polyamory] is adopted by more than, say, 25 percent of the population.”
I don’t want to detract from the very real concerns about sexual abuse and assault, but I would be sad (and more importantly, I don’t think it would do anything to alleviate sexual abuse and assault) if getting media attention from an article writer who isn’t too concerned with distinguishing between polyamory and abuse pushed EA in the direction of replicating these biases.
I have a cheap thing polyam folks can start doing today that would make a decent amount of progress over time.
more downvotes and social sanctions for the “monog is unenlightened” meme.
I know when people get excited about an awesome new social technology they want to scream it from the rooftops, and they think “why didn’t I try this sooner was I some kind of primitive?” But when you say that out loud, others hear “so you’re saying I’m a primitive”.
I’ve seen numerous comments and anecdotes of meatspace conversations that go further than that! “letting jealousy run your life means you need therapy” or “you’ve been brainwashed by the conformist masses of romcoms”, when they happen in our community they’re not downvoted into oblivion (yet, growth mindset)!
I don’t think it’s a referendum on community engagement in polyamory for us to listen to the complaints of people who are either obligate monog and had an experiment in polyam go south or monog and not interested in experimenting or questioning it.
(Keep in mind, many queer people go through the stage of skepticism that there exist any properly truly straight people at all. I sure did. This is seen as something to grow out of in the queer community. Let’s assert that assuming everyone would be polyam if they just tried harder to be civilized is something to grow out of, too).
Pollyamory is not necessarily a bad thing in all contexts and all implementations, and I’m not claiming that everyone who practices is an abuser—but on its face it seems intuitive that the prevalance of polly in a community would interact with frequency of sexual harrasment/assult (especially when layered on top of other things like high prevalance of aspergers+mood dissorders+professional relationships between members of the community).
I’m not advocating this entirely, but just to illustrate the point—imagine if most people in EA had cultural attitudes such that:
- It’s taboo to have sex or cuddle with somebody who you’re not in a serious committed relationship with - Propositioning someone who already has a partner was considered a vile thing to do, and could lead to serious humiliation for the proposer - Being in a long term, stable, exclusive partnership was seen as a very high-status signal, and having many sexual partners was considered low-status
If the culture in EA was more like this, (for better or worse), the frequency of unwanted physical advances would certianly be lower, right?
I agree that the article had an anti-polyamory vibe and that doesn’t seem helpful in it of itself and damaging to some who are not doing anything wrong. But I do think some discussion is warranted, not to be against polyamory, but for how our community treats it in such a way that it affects some dynamics (’cause it can be tricky!)
For me, the broader picture is,
The blurry professional/personal line EA generally has + a polyamory subculture used negatively + powerful men who are more likely to harass gives a complex equation that can lead to behavior like that discussed in this article. The article could’ve been more explicit about this. In sum for me, what seems damaging is qualities of the community that encourage/enable people to cross lines in such a way that allows some minorities to get harassed in this way.
Also just to add, most poly people I know in EA are respectful and the explicit culture I’ve been exposed to doesn’t encourage crossing lines; perhaps the implicit culture is a bit more sensitive.
Morally neutral doesn’t mean risk neutral. Also, as others have pointed out, if you have a community where norms around dating are clearly problematic, then increase the amount of people dating, things are likely to get messy.
I do think that this is a unique EA/rationalist polyamory issue though. I’m friends with quite a few polyamorous people in other scenes like partner dance, and things are handled much better there. Personally it seems the lack of understanding or care about social cues and the ‘holier than thou’ attitude in the Bay Area EA polycules is what is driving most of this bad behavior.
This feels complicated to say, because it’s going to make me seem like I don’t care about abuse and harassment described in the article. I do. It’s really bad and I wish it hadn’t happened, and I’m particularly sad that it’s happened within my community, and (more) that people in my community seemed often to not support the victims.
But I honestly feel very upset about the anti-polyamory vibe of all this. Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser. It’s not accepted in the wider community, so I value its acceptance in EA. I’d be sad if there was a community backlash against it because of stuff like this, because that would hurt a lot of people and I don’t think it would solve the problem.
I think the anti-poly vibe also makes it kind of...harder to work out what’s happening, and what exactly is bad, or something? Like, the article describes lots of stuff that’s unambiguously bad, like grooming and assault. But it says stuff like ‘Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college’. Like, what does it mean to ‘recruit someone to join your polyamorous relationship’? You mean he asked her out, when he was much older and she was in college, and he happened to be poly? Yet it’s sandwiched between descriptions of two unambiguously awful incidents of sexual harassment and grooming.
There was also a quote from someone who complained about her poly partner being a fuckboy. Which like… maybe this guy was not a good partner, but that’s kind of unrelated to whether he had multiple partners. And ‘this guy I dated was kind of a fuckboy and I wasn’t happy in the relationship’ isn’t in the same ballpark as abuse and harassment!
The inclusion of less-bad things doesn’t negate the broad point of the article, but if we want to actually tackle sexual harassment, it helps to know what exactly the problem is, rather than gesturing at ‘these people have Unconventional Ways and that’s Suspicious’.
I agree that the article moves between several situations of issues of hugely varying severity without acknowledging that, and this isn’t very helpful. And I like that EA is able to be a welcoming place for people who enjoy relationship structures that are discriminated against in the wider world. But I did want to push back against one particular piece:
In figuring out how we should view polyamory a key question to me is what it’s effects are. Imagine we could somehow run an experiment where we went back to having a taboo on non-monogamy regardless of partner consent: how would we expect the world to be different? Some predictions I’d make:
People who enjoy polyamorous relationships would be worse off.
Some people would be more productive because they’re less distracted by partner competition.
Other people would be less productive because getting a lot done was part of their approach to partner competition.
Some people would have kids who otherwise wouldn’t, or have kids earlier in life.
...
There would be less of the kind of power abuse described in the article because most high-status men would be married and this would be riskier for them (argued above).
Imagine a similar article talking about how it’s common for people on college campuses to drink and then assault people. While I would agree that drinking alcohol is morally neutral on its own, if it predictably leads to people assaulting each other more than they would in its absence that is one consideration among many for whether to discourage it.
[EDIT: see my response to Kelsey, below—I’m not advocating EAs avoid polyamory]
[this is partly also responding to your response to Kelsey below]
I think I view this differently because I prize personal freedom (for everyone) really highly, and I also think that the damage of community disapproval/the norms being ‘against’ you is pretty high, so I would be hesitant to argue strongly against any consensual and in-principle-not-harmful relationship style, even if there was evidence that it led to worse outcomes. In that situation, I’d try to mitigate the bad outcomes rather than discouraging the style.
To get a sense of why poly people are upset about this, imagine if someone was like ‘there are better outcomes if people are celibate—you save so much time and emotional energy that can be spent on research! So you should break up with your partner’. You’d probably have a strong ‘uh, no, wtf, I’m not doing that’ reaction. And maybe you’d say ‘oh I would never say anyone would break up with their partners’, but depriving someone of future potential positive relationships is also bad, and… like… maybe I’m just neurotic or not assertive enough or something, but if someone says ‘X is bad’, and I do X, I am inclined to take that seriously.
I also think advocating against polyamory wouldn’t be very effective at curbing abuses that stem from abusers being exposed to less risk, because I think if you’re brazen and sociopathic enough to do some of the things described in the article, and also high status, you’re not really going to care about whether your relationship style is vaguely discouraged. Like, stuff like grooming and hitting on young people you have power over and assault is already more-than-vaguely discouraged, and that didn’t help!
I’m confused by your analogy to celibacy because the analogous statements seem really different from anything I’ve said or think? I don’t think there are better outcomes if people refrain from polyamory, haven’t told anyone they should break up, and don’t think polyamory is bad.
This is getting deeper into a hypothetical (“what I think I would do in an alternative world where I had strong evidence that polyamory was harmful”) that I don’t think is very helpful? If you really want to know what I would do in this situation I’m willing to continue, but I’m nervous about people misinterpreting and thinking that I’m talking about a non-hypothetical.
I’m sorry to have misinterpreted you. I guess I’m confused by what your broad point is now—where do we disagree? I think I don’t understand why you disagree with my comment that ‘Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser.’
I’m not sure we disagree all that much, and I’m sorry for giving the impression otherwise!
Where I think we disagree is that I don’t think we can just take neutrality as an assumption? Instead, it matters what the effects are.
Please mentally reimagine this comment for some other ‘chosen’-stigma subgroup—being gay, trans or whatever.
You’re not wrong that in some abstract sense there’s a fact of the matter about having more people be that way makes the world better or worse, but that doesn’t mean it’s +EV to do armchair speculation about. And raising such speculation in response to someone saying they feel targeted by prejudice seems like particularly unempathic timing.
I am only tangentially involved in EA, but have been actively polyamorous for around ten years, so I hope it’s not too callous for me specifically to say that that was the most striking part of the article. The article includes a lot of sensationalizing and othering language around polyamory, including the repeated use of “join a polyamorous relationship” to mean dating someone who’s polyamorous, and the ‘so-called “polycules.”’ line.
I agree that it’s bad behavior for polyamorous people to pressure mono people to be poly, talk about monogamy as “less enlightened”, and such (and agree with quinn that it would reduce avenues for attacks on our community to actively discourage this behavior); but I think it’s kind of dishonest to discuss this without mentioning that mono people can be overly quick to categorize positive discussion of polyamory as “pressuring people to be mono”, due to the marginalized position of polyamory in society and the biases that creates.
The article itself is an example:
If you click through to the interview, though, what he argues is that 1) monogamy is partially rooted in men’s desire to know if children they’re fathering are biologically theirs and women’s desire to know if they can rely on their partner to stick around to help provide for a child 2) these worries might be lessened in the age of birth control, though he “would be surprised if [polyamory] is adopted by more than, say, 25 percent of the population.”
I don’t want to detract from the very real concerns about sexual abuse and assault, but I would be sad (and more importantly, I don’t think it would do anything to alleviate sexual abuse and assault) if getting media attention from an article writer who isn’t too concerned with distinguishing between polyamory and abuse pushed EA in the direction of replicating these biases.
I cosign this comment completely.
I have a cheap thing polyam folks can start doing today that would make a decent amount of progress over time.
more downvotes and social sanctions for the “monog is unenlightened” meme.
I know when people get excited about an awesome new social technology they want to scream it from the rooftops, and they think “why didn’t I try this sooner was I some kind of primitive?” But when you say that out loud, others hear “so you’re saying I’m a primitive”.
I’ve seen numerous comments and anecdotes of meatspace conversations that go further than that! “letting jealousy run your life means you need therapy” or “you’ve been brainwashed by the conformist masses of romcoms”, when they happen in our community they’re not downvoted into oblivion (yet, growth mindset)!
I don’t think it’s a referendum on community engagement in polyamory for us to listen to the complaints of people who are either obligate monog and had an experiment in polyam go south or monog and not interested in experimenting or questioning it.
(Keep in mind, many queer people go through the stage of skepticism that there exist any properly truly straight people at all. I sure did. This is seen as something to grow out of in the queer community. Let’s assert that assuming everyone would be polyam if they just tried harder to be civilized is something to grow out of, too).
Pollyamory is not necessarily a bad thing in all contexts and all implementations, and I’m not claiming that everyone who practices is an abuser—but on its face it seems intuitive that the prevalance of polly in a community would interact with frequency of sexual harrasment/assult (especially when layered on top of other things like high prevalance of aspergers+mood dissorders+professional relationships between members of the community).
I’m not advocating this entirely, but just to illustrate the point—imagine if most people in EA had cultural attitudes such that:
- It’s taboo to have sex or cuddle with somebody who you’re not in a serious committed relationship with
- Propositioning someone who already has a partner was considered a vile thing to do, and could lead to serious humiliation for the proposer
- Being in a long term, stable, exclusive partnership was seen as a very high-status signal, and having many sexual partners was considered low-status
If the culture in EA was more like this, (for better or worse), the frequency of unwanted physical advances would certianly be lower, right?
I agree that the article had an anti-polyamory vibe and that doesn’t seem helpful in it of itself and damaging to some who are not doing anything wrong. But I do think some discussion is warranted, not to be against polyamory, but for how our community treats it in such a way that it affects some dynamics (’cause it can be tricky!)
For me, the broader picture is,
The blurry professional/personal line EA generally has + a polyamory subculture used negatively + powerful men who are more likely to harass gives a complex equation that can lead to behavior like that discussed in this article. The article could’ve been more explicit about this. In sum for me, what seems damaging is qualities of the community that encourage/enable people to cross lines in such a way that allows some minorities to get harassed in this way.
Also just to add, most poly people I know in EA are respectful and the explicit culture I’ve been exposed to doesn’t encourage crossing lines; perhaps the implicit culture is a bit more sensitive.
Morally neutral doesn’t mean risk neutral. Also, as others have pointed out, if you have a community where norms around dating are clearly problematic, then increase the amount of people dating, things are likely to get messy.
I do think that this is a unique EA/rationalist polyamory issue though. I’m friends with quite a few polyamorous people in other scenes like partner dance, and things are handled much better there. Personally it seems the lack of understanding or care about social cues and the ‘holier than thou’ attitude in the Bay Area EA polycules is what is driving most of this bad behavior.